Jeff Skoll's Billion-Dollar Plan To Save The World

Skoll read avidly as a child. On camping trips with his sister and parents he leaned toward Huxley and Orwell. "By a very early age it had struck me that a lot of the trends in the world would be scary: not enough resources to go around, terrible new weapons, potentially devastating wars," he says.

He wanted to write books to get the message out about these dangers, but the pragmatist in him knew he needed to make money first. It turned out there were limits to how much of a priority money would be. His father was diagnosed with kidney cancer a few years before Skoll entered the University of Toronto for an electrical engineering degree. Skoll's father sold his industrial-chemicals business to his business partner for not a lot of money and moved to the Caribbean. "My dad always wanted to sail. They lived on a boat for eight years," says Skoll. "He said something at the time that was very influential. He said he was afraid he hadn't done the things he wanted to with his life. That was really a wake-up call. Without my father being sick [he's alive today] when I was a kid, I might not have done this."

Skoll worked his way through university pumping gas; in 1987 he started a computer rental company, from which people kept stealing computers. An attempt to do systems engineering consulting did better but wasn't the hit he wanted. "I realized very quickly that I had no idea what I was doing," he says.

He left Canada for an M.B.A. at Stanford and, through friends in Silicon Valley, met Pierre Omidyar. Omidyar approached Skoll in 1995 about creating an online auction company. Skoll told him it didn't sound like a good idea. Not long afterward Omidyar told him revenue was doubling every month and he needed help. Skoll was eBay's first employee and first president.

Skoll took charge of the back end of eBay operations, wrote the business plan and helped with hiring to keep up with the torrid pace of growth. "We were in a constant sprint," Omidyar says in an e-mail. Three years later Skoll became a billionaire soon after the IPO. "All of a sudden I not only had the money to start to write the stories, but I realized I could do other things with it," he says. He started eBay's foundation with just a few million dollars. He thought he could do more on his own.

In 1999 he created the Skoll Foundation with $34 million. It was a part-time effort, making ad hoc grants. A skiing accident that year left Skoll with his back so badly hurt he couldn't sit down. Throughout 2000 he took meetings lying on a conference table. The discomfort was a big reason for leaving eBay in January 2001. Now he could focus on expanding his foundation quickly.

Skoll hired Sally Osberg, the founding executive director of the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose, Calif., to run his foundation. When they went to see her mentor, John Gardner, Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Health, Education & Welfare and before that president of the Carnegie Foundation, his advice was to "bet on good people doing good things," a phrase that stuck with Skoll.

Skoll and Osberg heard from entrepreneurs that they were having difficulty getting past the early stages. Skoll streamlined the process: Offer grants with minimal paperwork, supply three years of funding (ranging from $440,000 to $2 million) and deliver help on media and strategic advice. To improve the business skills of social entrepreneurs, Skoll pledged $8 million in 2003 to create the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Oxford. The foundation pays for five entrepreneurs a year to take M.B.A. classes to help their organizations grow. Every year at Oxford, Jeff Skoll hosts the Skoll World Forum, where many of the social entrepreneurs end up cutting deals. Kiva's Flannery is working with five others he met at the forum. Says Andrea Coleman, cofounder of African health care nonprofit Riders for Health, a 2006 awardee: "Sometimes we think we should just fundraise for these other amazing people."

A slice of the Amazonian region Skoll's foundation is working to protect.

The Skoll Foundation gets over 250 applications a year and usually makes four to six grants--last year it made four. Skoll and Osberg developed a rigorous application system, starting with an eligibility quiz. Applicants also have to line up with one of their causes, which is a big list: the environment, health, human rights, ?institutional responsibility, peace and security, and economic and social equity. And the timing of your cause has to be right, with requirements such as a lack of civil wars raging in your country.

Ann Cotton runs the Campaign for Female Education, or Camfed, a 19-year-old U.K. nonprofit that has helped 1.9 million children in five African countries attend school and lift their economic status. Skoll grants of $3.6 million since 2005 helped Camfed expand its program from 10,700 girls a year to 25,400 girls, as well as attract larger multimillion-dollar donations from the MasterCard Foundation and the U.K. Department for International Development. "I do believe investment from Skoll at that time was a major catalyst," says Cotton. "We are at another level."

Three years ago Skoll pledged $100 million to the Skoll Global Threats Fund, which tackles the knottiest of problems--pandemics, climate change, Middle East conflict, nuclear weapons and water--through supported advocacy groups. With the Rockefeller, Packard, Hewlett and other foundations, Skoll set up Climate Nexus, a swift-response team that fact-checks media reports and research studies on global warming. The Global Threats fund is backing improved efforts globally to test for pathogens and detect outbreaks more quickly.

Skoll still has decades of philanthropy to go and plenty more he wants to do. He has been living in Beverly Hills for the last seven years but over the summer moved back to Silicon Valley with his girlfriend, Stephanie. H e's hoping to have children and wants to leave them some of his fortune but not a lot. In 2010 Bill Gates called and asked Skoll to sign the Giving Pledge, and Skoll easily said yes. "If I die today," he says, "everything goes to the foundations."